Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I commute into NYC and use a scooter every day, covering about 3-4 miles. I had a couple years in on regular Razor scooters so did have some experience with various types of smaller wheeled scooters. For the last 2 and a half years I have been riding another brand and I will tell you why. Here are some of the issues I found with the Xootr I purchased. These were fed back to the team at Xootr 2-3 years ago and got no response. Handle post is a solid piece. You cannot detach the bars, so if you need to carry, store or move through crowds of people you will constantly have issues with this. It does not fit in a commuter bus overhear bin for example. The foot bed is very wide on the standard models. This has two detrimental side effects: One is again storage, as, not only is it tall folded, but because of the handle post and the width of the foot bed, it also is wide. The second is your kick leg has to move further out and around it to contact the ground. In practice this means that your standing leg has to bend further so that the leg pushing can do it's work. This means that the standing leg gets tired faster. The magnesium on the foot bed can chip. The magnesium foot bed model is only one of a number of Xootr options, but on the model I had it chipped within the first week, and in a place where there was no contact with anything likely to cause a chip. This looked unsightly and didn't speak highly of the quality of the materials. The Xootr pin to secure the scooter is a simple idea, in theory, but fiddly in practice. If you drop the pin and happen to be standing over sewer or subway grating or in a crowd of people (Murphy's law says you will always end up in one of these situations for some reason) you are out of luck. The pin also has a bad habit of coming apart very easily (it screws together). If you lose a piece of this pin, you are going nowhere. I tied mine to the scooter with a piece of yellow nylon rope. Why am I tying a $220 product together with string? The brake is on the front. This is my biggest complaint from a safety perspective and an area where I think Razor actually got it right. I am very athletic and I regularly move through the streets of NYC at speeds of up to 20 mph (depends on the road surface). Drivers and taxis in NY change their minds in a heartbeat and suddenly end up in front of you. You have to be able to stop. With a Xootr you hit the handbrake and you shoot over the front off the foot bed, while holding the handle bars, only to have the foot bed then swing around and whack you in the back of the ankle. This hurts like hell. Also remember you are now standing in the middle of traffic. The Razor scooter design means that to stop you must move your body weight back and over the rear wheel because you use the rear fender to stop. This keeps you solidly on your scooter and still in control. You only need to have a couple close calls to see the flaw in the Xooter design. Big wheels. You will find that if a scooter is designed with a bit of thought you can have big wheels and easy storage. Razor has just released a large wheel scooter that proves this point but comes up a little short on the foot bed. The larger the wheel the faster and smoother the ride because the rolling resistance is reduced. If you have a long thin foot bed you can rest the front of your pushing foot to the rear of the resting foot without depressing the rear fender. This gives you a very flat storage and the opportunity for bigger wheels. I ride a "Viza Kickit Air" which came with pneumatic tires which give a very smooth ride, but are silly because they can flat and they actually take so much more energy to push. What is nice about this model, however, is the quality of the build and the fact that you can put 7" wheels on it. I have actually gone from the original wheels to 6" Trikke wheels and then on to Trikke 7" wheels and the ease of ride after the transition to the bigger wheels was noticeable in each case. So I guess this is as much a review as another design note to Xooter (I simply could not resist when I saw the VP of Xootr and the infamous Dorlene writing reviews). After all, what's the point of continuing to stand still if you are a scooter company ?